NSW Office of Environment and Heritage is being dissolved. More truthful version – the regions are being scr$wed over to allow Berejiklian Government’s mates a freer hand to develop coastal NSW to death

The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April2019:

A government spokeswoman said the restructuring would enable the administration "to better serve the people of NSW".

"For the first time, we have a combined Energy and Environment portfolio and this new structure will ensure the government can take a holistic approach to this issue," she told the Herald. "The functions currently performed by OEH will continue.”

Among staff, though, the worry was that the oversight separately developed and funded for years would now be subsumed in the expanded Planning cluster, with job losses one consequence.

Rob Stokes, a former environment minister, returns as Planning Minister as part of the government's post-election reshuffle. Matt Kean will be the new Energy and Environment minister….

One senior staffer told the Herald OEH had often provided a dissenting view to Planning, such as when new housing projects in the Sydney Basin threatened the dwindling natural reserves. Remaining koala corridors, for instance, were among the habitats at risk.

Work that had previously been conducted by inhouse OEH experts was already being diverted to external consultants - a process staff worry will accelerate with the bureaucratic overhaul now under way.

"There has already been a strong shift away from the environment having its own voice already," the staffer said.

Penny Sharpe, acting Labor leader and environment spokeswoman, said NSW had now become the only state in Australia without an environment department.

"One of the first acts of the Premer - after talking a lot about the environment during the election - is to abolish the Office of Environment," Ms Sharpe said.

"This is a terrible outcome for the environment of NSW and it's a betrayal for [voters]," she said.  "We know it was a very important, top-order issue for many, many people."

The environmental problems facing the state include more than 1000 plant and animal species threatened with extinction, an 800 per cent increase in land-clearing during the past three years, and waterways "that are in crisis", Ms Sharpe said.

Scott Morrison just can't resist the urge to meddle in Liberal Party candidate selection

Latest version of Scott Morrison on the Net

Yet another 'captain's pick' is on the cards.....

The Canberra Times, 31 March 2019:

A Liberal vying to become the party's candidate for Craig Laundy's old seat has delivered an astonishing condemnation of the closed-door selection process, just as Prime Minister Scott Morrison prepares to name his captain's pick for the hotly contested Sydney electorate.

Controversial psychiatrist and writer Tanveer Ahmed - who is among a number of people under consideration for the job - slammed the process as unfair and undemocratic, arguing he had been denied the opportunity to confront his challengers.

It is expected Mr Morrison could recommend a candidate to replace Mr Laundy in the inner west seat of Reid as soon as Sunday, to be rubber-stamped by the party's state executive on Monday.

The Sun-Herald understands Dr Ahmed met with Mr Morrison's principal private secretary Yaron Finkelstein and factional powerbroker Alex Hawke, the Special Minister of State, and has been positively vetted.

But Mr Morrison is said to be considering other options including two women and failed state election candidate for Kogarah, Scott Yung. Liberal pollsters have also gauged support for Coca Cola executive Tanya Baini.

It is likely to be tears before bedtime for many regional communities as Berejiklian Government restructures government departments

Government News, 2 April 2019:   

 

The NSW government will abolish key agencies including the Office of Local Government, the RMS and Jobs NSW under sweeping changes to the structure of the NSW public service.

A memo from the Department of  Premier and Cabinet obtained by Government News says the Office of Local Government, along with the Office of Environment and Heritage, will cease to be independent entities and their functions will be absorbed by a Planning and Industry Cluster.

The cluster will cover areas such as long term planning, precincts, infrastructure, open space, the environment and natural resources.

The RMS, coming under the Transport Cluster, will also be scrapped as a separate agency and as will Jobs NSW, which will be merged into the Treasury Cluster…..

Local Government NSW President Linda Scott said the peak would be seeking assurances from the new local government minister, Shelley Hancock, and the Premier, that local governments would be appropriately resourced within the new cluster.

“We’d hope, for example, that the inclusion into a larger cluster will facilitate real analysis of the massive amounts of data collected by Government, which should be shared with the sector to help them deliver great outcomes for the public good,” she told Government News.

“Local governments welcome a new opportunity to work with the State Government to set housing targets with local governments, not for them – to rebalance planning powers by working in partnership with councils and their neighbourhoods on planning decisions that affect them.”

However she said the appointment of Ms Hancock was a stand-alone Local Government Minister was welcomed and had long been advocated for by LGNSW.....

The memo says the structure of the public service will also incorporate the following clusters: Stronger Communities, Customer Service, Health; Premier and Cabinet, Transport, Treasury  and Education.

The following clusters will cease to exist by July 1:  Finance, Services & Innovation; Industry; Planning & Environment; Family and Communities; and Justice.

The Secretaries Board will be expanded in members to accommodate more senior public servants to “effectively drive implementation of the Government’s priorities”.

New appointments under the restructure:

Michael Coutts-Trotter – Secretary, Families & Community Services & Justice

Jim Betts – Secretary, Planning and Industry

Glenn King – Secretary, Customer Service

Simon Draper – Chief Executive, Infrastructure Australia

NOTE:

The Grafton Loop of the Knitting Nannas Against Gas and Greed will be holding a knit-in on Thursday 4 April 2019 at 1pm to peacefully protest the abolition of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. It will be held outside the electoral office of Nationals MP for Clarence Chris Gulaptis at 11 Prince Street, Grafton and interested people are welcome to attend.

Hottest March on record in Australia and hottest start to the year

ABC News, 1 April 2019:

Blair Trewin, senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), said March was a continuation of what we saw over summer in a lot of ways.

Not only was it the hottest March, but it has also been the hottest start to the year on record. By a lot.

"It's come in about 2.2 degrees above the long term for the first quarter of the year," Dr Trewin said.

"That's nearly a degree hotter than the previous hottest first quarter of the year.

"We've had the hottest January, we've had the hottest March and February was also in the top five."

Nearly a degree is a very large margin to break a record by.

"Even for an individual month that would be a very significant margin, but to be breaking a three-month-period record by nearly a degree is something which we would see very rarely, if ever in a continent the size of Australia," Dr Trewin said....

It may feel like the "hottest on record" headline is a constant these days but Dr Trewin said it was still not exactly normal.

"We're still getting the occasional cool months but the frequency of record warm months and seasons has gone up quite substantially in the last decade or so with the background long-term warming," he said.

"Whilst we've seen a particularly extreme few months, the background warming trend we see in Australia, as we do globally, is in the order of 0.1 to 0.2 of a degree per decade.

"Projections are that that's expected to continue at least at that rate," he said.

_____________________________________________________________

Key points:

o   March 2019 was the warmest on record for mean, minimum and maximum temperatures in Australia

o   Rainfall was below average through the centre of the country but well above average where cyclones hit

o   Outlook for the next three months suggests continued above-average temperatures

_____________________________________________________________

Est. 32 per cent of Australian farmers still haven't come to grips with the reality of climate change

ABC News, 31 March 2019:

When the Reserve Bank announced recently that it was factoring climate change into interest rate calculations, it underlined a mainstream acceptance of potential impacts for a warming planet.

Climate change now had economic consequences.

But resistance to the premise of human-induced climate change still rages, including in regional and rural communities, which often are the very communities already feeling its effects.

"When you look at the results of different surveys going back a few years, farmers were four times more likely than the national average to be climate change deniers," said Professor Mark Howden, director at the ANU's Climate Change Institute.

"That was about 32 per cent versus about 8 per cent for the population average."

So, why do so many people in regional and rural areas not believe in climate change?

ABC Central West's Curious project put that question to some experts, who say the answer has more to do with human nature than scientific reasoning.

Professor Matthew Hornsey from the University of Queensland has dedicated his academic career to understanding why people reject apparently reasonable messages.

"The metaphor that's used in my papers is around what we call cognitive scientists versus cognitive lawyers," he said.

"What we hope people do when they interpret science is that they weigh it up in an independent way and reach a conclusion.

"But in real life, people behave more like lawyers, where they have a particular outcome that they have in mind and then they selectively interpret the evidence in a way that prosecutes the outcome they want to reach.

"So you selectively expose yourself to information, you selectively critique the information, you selectively remember the information in a way that reinforces what your gut is telling you."

This is known as motivated reasoning — and online news source algorithms and social forums are only enabling the phenomenon, allowing for further information curation for the individual…..

Professor Hornsey says there is another force fanning the flames of distrust between the scientific and non-scientific communities.

"One thing that can be said without huge amounts of controversy is that there is a relationship between political conservatism and climate scepticism in Australia," he said.

To better understand this, the professor's research took him to 27 countries and found that for two-thirds of these, there was no relationship between being politically conservative and a climate science sceptic.

But Australia's relationship between the two trailed only the United States in strength of connection, he said.

"What we were seeing was the greater the per-capita carbon emissions of a country, the greater that relationship between climate scepticism and conservatism."

Professor Hornsey argues that per-capita carbon emissions is an indicator for fossil fuel reliance, which in turn creates greater stakes for the vested interests at play.

"When the stakes are high and the vested interests from the fossil fuel community are enormous, you see funded campaigns of misinformation, coaching conservatives what to think about climate change," he said.

"That gets picked up by conservative media and you get this orchestrated, very consistent, cohesive campaign of misinformation to send the signal that the science is not yet in."…..

Professor Hornsey believes current discourse can make farmers feel as though they are at the centre of an overwhelming societal problem, triggering further psychological rejection of the science.

"I feel sorry for farmers around the climate change issue, because this is a problem that has been caused collectively.

"Farmers are only a small part of the problem but they are going to be a huge part of the solution, so I think they feel put upon.

"They feel like they are constantly being lectured about their need to make sacrifices to adapt to a set of circumstances that are largely out of their control."

In 2010, in response to a drought policy review panel, the Commonwealth initiated a pilot of drought reform measures in Western Australia.

John Noonan from Curtin University led the program, which went on to have staggering success in converting not only participating farmers' attitudes to climate science, but also in restructuring their farm management models in response to a changing climate.

"First of all, when talking with farmers, we didn't call it the drought pilot — we used the name Farm Resilience Program," Mr Noonan said.

"If you go in to beat people up and have a climate change conversation, you get nowhere.

"We got the farmers to have conversations about changing rainfall patterns and continuing dry spells, rather than us telling them what to do.

"And they told us everything that we needed them to tell us for us to reflect that back to them and say, 'Well, actually, that's climate change'.

"If you take a very left-brain, very scientific approach to these matters, you are going nowhere, and what we used was very right-brain, very heart and gut-driven — and it worked."

Mr Evans agrees, underscoring the deeply personal connection farmers have to the land, its role in their business approach, and why the message must be managed psychologically rather than scientifically.

"Ultimately, for a farmer to confront the reality that this new climate might be permanent, requires them to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance."

The full article can be read here.

A federal budget for hopeless optimists was delivered by the Morrison Government on 2 April 2019

https://youtu.be/C64ZC-0Oju4

This was Australian treasurer and Liberal MP for Kooyong Josh Frydenberg delivering his first budget speech on 2 April 2019:

Tonight, I announce that the budget is back in the black and Australia is back on track.

For the first time in 12 years, our nation is again paying its own way….

John Howard and Peter Costello paid off Labor’s debt. And tonight the Morrison government sets a path to do it again, without increasing taxes.

This matters because over the last year the interest bill on the national debt was $18bn.

And this was in a low interest rate environment.

This is money that could have built 500 schools or a world-class hospital in each state and territory.

We are reducing the debt and this interest bill.

Not through higher taxes, but by responsible budget management and by growing the economy.

In the actual budget papers he asserts that:

Net debt in 2019-20 is expected to be $361 billion, representing 18 per cent of GDP. By 2022-23, net debt is expected to decline to $326.1 billion (14.4 per cent of GDP). Net debt is then projected to be eliminated over the medium term (2029-30)

So whose debt is Frydenberg complaing about and why is the economic furture so suddenly rosy?

At the end of the month in 2013 in which Tony Abbott became Prime Minister of Australia the gross national debt stood at est. $220.67 billion and net national debt was $174.55 billion. At the time net national debt was in the vicinity of 13% of GDP.

By 2 April 2019 the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government had raised the gross national debt to $534.42 billion. 

That's more than double the national debt left by the previous Labor federal government.

Frydenberg is predicting that gross national will rise to $627.26 billion by end of June 2019 with net national debt coming in at $373.47 billion and net debt predicted to come in at 19.2% of GDP by end of June. 

By 30 June the federal government will have paid $18.15 billion in interest on this debt in the 2018-19 financial year.

I don't know about anyone else but to me it definitely looks as though the Liberal-Nationals Coalition governments have well and truly contribted to the national debt in the last five and a haf years.

According to the 2019-20 Budget that Frydenberg just delivered gross national debt is expected to rise for the next three financial years while at the same time it is hoped that net national debt will decrease.

When it comes to national debt a net decrease in the debt does not always mean the actual government debt is falling - it simply means that the government of the day expects to have enough assets and income to honour the total debt if the entire amount was theoretically called in by the debtors.

However, Frydenberg predicts that both net national debt and interest that the gross debt attracts will fall over the next four financial years, despite federal government expenses increasing and expected tax receipts (including GST receipts) being revised down by $26 billion over those same four years.

Frydenberg also says the Morrison Government will deliver an underlying cash balance of $7.1 billion by 30 June next year even though that underlying cash balance is $4.1 billion in deficit this year. To do that the Treasurer has to pull $11.2 billion out of his back pocket in the next fourteen months.

Months in which it is committed to delivering the cash splash it has included in this pre-election budget.

An ordinary voter like myself has to ask: Where's the money coming from to supposedly get the government books back into the black?

The Morrison Government must be privately asking itself the same question as Budget Statement 7 only gives that government a 70 per cent chance of being able to bring in a $7.1 billion suplus this coming financial year

Budget 2019-20 papers can be found here.

NOTE:

Only one item in the Morrison Government 2019-20 budget is likely to be passed on 3 April 2019 before the Australian Parliament is dissolved to meet the required timeline to issue  writs for the federal election. This means that all the budget promises made by Frydenberg are on the never never and if the Coalition Government wins that election it may change some budget details come 30 June.

Morrison Government still refusing to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions

The Guardian, 31 March 2019:

Cuts to carbon emissions from vehicle efficiency standards have been left out of government projections for meeting Australia’s Paris climate commitments, indicating the policy has been shelved.

The office of the transport minister, Michael McCormack, said the government had not made a decision on “how or when” standards to cut carbon pollution from vehicles might be implemented.

After almost five years of submissions a spokesman said the government “is not going to rush into a regulatory solution” with regards to vehicle emissions.

New data shows Australia’s emissions from transport are soaring and projected to be 82% higher in 2030 than they were in 1990.

Australia lags behind the rest of the world in setting vehicle efficiency standards, with most countries in the OECD adopting policies to reduce emissions and improve the efficiency of cars.

The ministerial forum on vehicle emissions was set up under the Turnbull government in 2015, and stakeholders are frustrated at the lack of progress.

Fact sheets produced by the government that set out how it intends to reach Australia’s emissions reduction targets under the Paris agreement suggest any policy on vehicle emissions standards has been abandoned.

In 2015, the government produced a graph indicating it expected to achieve cuts of about 100m tonnes between 2020 and 2030 through vehicle emissions standards.

The government’s latest climate package contains no mention of this, and projects only about 10m tonnes of abatement through an electric vehicle strategy, with no reference to vehicle emissions standards....